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18 - Science, technology, and the Cold War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2010

By
David Reynolds
Edited by
Melvyn P. Leffler  and
Odd Arne Westad
Melvyn P. Leffler
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
Odd Arne Westad
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
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Summary

History has seen many ferocious ideological conflicts, including the Crusades and the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion. What made the Cold War peculiarly dangerous and ubiquitous was the power of modern technology, most obviously nuclear weapons. But other new technologies were equally central: out of a vast range this chapter looks particularly at transistors, satellites, and computers. On both sides, the Cold War spawned massive military-industrial complexes, but the American version was much better integrated with the larger economy and society. The Soviet system, by contrast, suppressed the civilian economy and restricted the flow of information.; In the short term, this enabled the Soviet Union to punch above its economic weight as a military power. By the 1980s, however, technology and information had become the Soviet Achilles heel.

The varieties of ‘Big Science’

‘When history looks at the twentieth century’, wrote the American physicist Alvin Weinberg in 1961, ‘she will see science and technology as its theme; she will find in the monuments of Big Science’, such as huge rockets and particle accelerators, ‘symbols of our time just as surely as she finds in Notre Dame a symbol of the Middle Ages.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of the Cold War , pp. 378 - 399
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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